cover image The Barefoot Shoemaker: Capitalizing on the New

The Barefoot Shoemaker: Capitalizing on the New

Vladimir Kvint, V. L. Kvint. Arcade Publishing, $24.95 (234pp) ISBN 978-1-55970-182-2

Economist Kvint's expertise on the former U.S.S.R. is apparent: a native Siberian who headed an industrial complex there, he was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Now a professor of international business at Fordham University Graduate School of Business, he is a consultant on joint ventures in his one-time homeland (he left in 1989). Yet his guide to doing business in Russia is so scattershot that those looking for advice would do better to seek out more detailed books, such as Cutting the Red Tape by Mark Tourevski and Eileen Morgan (Nonfiction Forecasts, Jan. 4). A patient reader, however, willing to plod through countless preening pages on Kvint's formative years (he even tells us that he was the Youth Middleweight Boxing Champion) and his boasting about his professional acumen, will find nuggets: there is no ``Western logic'' to the Russians' conduct of business; money talks, but not with the same dialect as in the West; business structures, as under the Soviets, are ``geared not to profit, but to power and privilege.'' Kvint predicts that the surest profits will be realized in the Russian Far East, the ``new Klondike,'' and directs investors to research the ``free economic zones'' where a totally free market is permitted. He fails, however, to take into account the possibility that Russia will abandon economic reform--a prospect which, as this review goes to press and a political crisis rages in Moscow, is conceivable. (June)